Some people think literature means anything that’s written. Some people think it’s writing that’s good or truthful. Other people try to define literature as a set of reader expectations.

For me, literature is a social process.

Literature is a social process that makes aesthetic judgements and facilitates the production and consumption of writing. Everybody says what they like and that defines what is ‘good’.

Writers are crucial sure, but so are readers, editors, critics, bloggers, fans, agents, publishers – most of them take more than one role.

This anthology traces is about the social process that created African speculative fiction.

Yes, there has always been imaginative storytelling in Africa.

But a defined series of genres that help shape writing? Venues where readers could find the stuff? Where SFF writers could get published and (sometimes) even paid? Awards specifically for speculative fiction by Africans?

No. Not until recently.

Things really took off about 2012. The earliest flickerings were about 2003 – though deep deep roots go back to earlier fantastic writing, and all the way into millennia of African culture.

This is a collection of damn good stories – plus a complete comic and an excerpt from a film script.

They tell tales about how South Africans will market themselves in the future. About how fire came to Uganda. About how two lonely women in the far future can each be writing a novel, one about the other. About how ancient West Africans wrote about the stars. About how superheroes are always political. About how people will in the future mourn their dead.

But each of the 21 stories is also a moment in history, part of the process. It stands for itself. It also stands for other similar stories, or writers who came with them in waves. They stand for the editors who founded venues that gave that story a home.

This is about how African speculative fiction gave birth to itself.

A year-by-year historical review will help tell that story and an Endnote will speculate about how the process may have worked.

Most of the 21 are available only in print. We want to make this fiction available to young Africans where they live – on their smartphones or tablets.

The Manchester Review is based at a university and we know it’s important for students and readers to access work electronically. This anthology will be a resource for seminars, workshops and courses on fiction or specifically African SFF.

The publishers asked that we didn’t include stories already online for free. That worked against younger, frequently female writers. That meant some of the most influential online journals – Omenana or Jalada – could not be represented.

So we end with links to a further 21 stories that are available only online and for free. 21 Today and then 21 Tomorrow.

Prepare to be amazed by, to be challenged by, maybe even to fall in love with African speculative fiction.

Geoff Ryman

Geoff Ryman is a Canadian living in the UK. He received a Leverhulme International Academic Fellowship for 2016 that paid for him to interview 100 African writers of speculative fiction. He is writing up the 100 interviews step by step and publishing them on the Strange Horizons website. His own fiction has won many awards from the Arthur C Clarke Award (twice) to the British Science Fiction Award (three times, including his non fictions series 100 African Writers of SFF), the Canadian Sunburst Award (twice) and many others including the Philip K Dick Award, the James Tiptree Award and the Nebula Award for best novelet. Until September 2017 he remains a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, teaching creative writing. He does administrative work for the African Speculative Fiction Society and the Nommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans, which he helped develop.